SoC ideas

[Max <mwiehle2 ix urz uni-heidelberg de>]

Hi,

I've been playing around with beagle for some time and seeing it on the
SoC page i thought about proposing a project. I've been thinking about
different ideas and wanted to ask what people working on beagle
generally think about them before proposing something going into a
totally different direction than where you are heading. 

One idea has been including some of the information about packages
available in package managers like apt into beagle. This would probably
be a query backend interfacing to things like apt-cache search. This
idea mainly came up because packages are one of the frequent things i'm
searching for. What do you think? Are there any plans to do that / has
it been done? Are there reasons not to do it?

In the long term perspective there is also tons of meta data available
in apt and dpkg - especially telling you what package a certain file
belongs to and so on. This might be very interesting if one wants to
develope a system of contextual navigation like proposed by the tenor
project (http://dot.kde.org/1113428593/)
I imagine looking at a files metadata seeing the package it belongs to,
clicking that package, seeing dependencies, clicking a package that
depends on the first one and clicking the man-file that came with it. 

This idea is still quite far away i think. But it also came to my mind
when trying out leaftag. With leaftag it would already quite easy to
implement a gui browsing through your tags and files. Clicking a file
shows its tags, clicking a tag shows the files tagged with this tag.
But tagging by hand is quite time consuming and still does not offer
enough metadata. It also differentiates between uri's and tags where i
would like an more rdf-like approach showing relations between different
uri's.
So i thought about extending leaftag but it looks like beagle already
has quite a good support for metadata. So maybe enabling browsing and
refining of searches with metadata in beagle might be a way to go. 
I think this might be a step to a different way of browsing data.
Is this something you could imagine to happen in beagle or do you rather
want to focus on doing search right and leave browsing etc. to projects
like tenor?

Thanks for your comments - and for writing beagle of course. ;-)
 Max